Geoff and Marcy Larson Alaskan Brewing Company Northern Innovators Hall of Fame Member

The Statewide Committee for Research honors Alaska's Northern Innovators Geoff and Marcy Larson Alaskan Brewing Company Northern Innovators Hall of Fame Member Thirty years ago, powered by their affection brewers ship mounds of spent grains to dairy After going through the mash-filter press, for beer, Alaska, and one another, Marcy and farmers, who feed them to cattle as a cheap the grain emerges in a finer state, with the Geoff Larson created a brewery in a small protein source. Another option is to give consistency of sawdust. Upon seeing it, crew Alaska city. That idea is not an original one the leavings away as a compost ingredient. members at Alaskan Brewing thought it looked today (Fort Collins, Colorado, for example, is Neither was a great option in Juneau, home to burnable, if properly dried. The Larsons and home to more than 20 small breweries), but few cows. their employees thought biofuel. it was then. And that forward-thinking has in many ways rewarded the Juneau couple, who In the early days, the Larsons shipped their They searched for adequate furnace systems now export their product by barge for delivery grains to farmers in Washington state. They already in place and found none. So, they got a to 17 other states. invested in a dryer, which helped preserve and team together and brainstormed ways to turn lighten grains, lessening the shipping costs. But malted grain and hops into energy. Cracking Outside markets in which consumers even after the grain is dried, Alaskan Brewing have hundreds of beer choices is an Company produces more than 7 million pounds They decided on a furnace that would turn achievement worth noting, but the way the of this potential waste product each year. burned grains to steam power, but found Larsons have executed would make them no ideal commercial boiler. They designed stand apart even if they weren’t operating from Now, rather than barging out the grain or their own. a place with no road connection to America. overwhelming the Juneau landfill, the brewery burns the dried product. It creates steam that In 2013, the Larsons installed a one-of-a-kind Along with allowing Alaskan Brewing powers their brewing process. This has allowed spent-grain boiler made by a company in North Company’s employees to use their Alaskan Brewing Company to be true to a Dakota. The steam produced fires the grain imaginations to invent new beers with hints lofty stated goal: “To have a zero-net negative dryer, with plenty of steam left over to power of spruce tips and alder-smoked malt, the effect upon our environment by reclaiming the remainder of brewhouse operations. Not Larsons have become one of the greenest and reusing at least as much waste and only are they keeping hills of grain out of the breweries on Earth. emissions as we produce.” waste stream, they save $450,000 dollars each year with the process. How? In developing their “beer-powered beer,” The sparks for this absurd-in-Alaska they have saved more than 80,000 gallons of achievement began in 2008, when the Alaskan Brewing Company also has a carbon- No. 2 diesel fuel each year by using their spent brewery installed a mash filter grain press dioxide reclamation system. The brewers brewing grains to power a steam boiler that that saved more than one million gallons of recapture the CO2 produced during the sprung from their own imaginations. water over their older method, a traditional fermentation process and use it for bottling lauter tun. The latter, they explained, is to operations. They figure the system prevents Their Earth-friendly methods were in part drip coffee what the mash press is to a French more than 900,000 pounds of CO2 from adaptations to operating in Juneau, Alaska’s press/espresso machine. being released into the atmosphere every year. capital city hemmed in by glaciers, mountain That’s like removing 80 cars from the road. walls and the Pacific Ocean. In other places, .

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